Free, I browsed the H1N1 headlines from a pile of major news sources and none of them had a sentence like, “H1N1 kills children 10 times more than regular influenza.” You’d think they would because it sounds scary enough to boost their news ratings, right?

Instead, they all say something like, “Every year the flu usually kills 36,000 people but H1N1 is a really nasty one.” Implying that there might be many more than 36,000 deaths… maybe twice as many?? Worse??? when actually we’re looking at maybe an extra 500 deaths (1% more than usual), albeit mostly from children which is very unusual and possibly foreboding of nastier flu outbreaks.

And there’s all these news articles like, “Area man killed by H1N1.” Scary! The trouble is, every year 36,000 Americans die from the flu. These “news” pieces could have aired any year.

I think this is called a base rate fallacy and the fact that such appeals work on people really frustrates me. It’s related to the following…

Did you hear about the car accident last week? 1,000 people were killed! Yes, really! Take a look!

Feh, I know… I’m conflating some ideas here. I should spend the time to sort this all out. But there’s not enough time in a day and I don’t believe I’m helping anyone here, so I’ll leave it alone.